A Note on the Taita Hills, Kenya Colony

Abstract

FOR nearly seventeen months in 1940-41, the writer made extensive traverses across that part of Kenya lying east of Kilima Njaro and north of the Voi-Taveta branch railway. The water supply of the region is of much economic importance because of the rapid desiccation, which has now reached a stage recalling the semi-desert of the Northern Frontier Province of Kenya (Geogr..J. 94(1939)162). The central part of the district is drained by the Tsavo river, fed by tributaries rising on the slopes of Kilima Njaro and by the Mzima, a stream of some importance flowing from the north over the lavas south of the Chyulu hills and emptying into the Tsavo some 35 miles west of Tsavo Bridge. This together with the small but valuable streams flowing from the southern slopes of the Taita hills, N.W.-W.N.W. of Voi, are the sole rivers of the district. The Taita hills, described by Joseph Thomson in 1884 as strikingly suggestive of an archipelago of islands rising with great abruptness from a greyish-green sea, are the divide between the Voi river and the channels draining the hills on the north to the Tsavo. These hills are a geographical entity distmguished by their steep almost precipitous valleys, culminating in a series of picturesque peaks reaching a height of 7000 feet. They form a delightful exception to the depressing country around, for the rainfall, taken over a period of more than twenty years, averages about 50 inches; Voi, about 2000 feet, has some 21*5 inches, and Tsavo has 16 inches. With the exception of the fertile Taita hills and the neighbourhood of the Voi-Taveta railway the country is now uninhabited and all but waterless, a desolate expanse of thorn-scrub and scattered flat-topped acacias. No map of the whole district which can be considered accurate to within a mile is^ available.